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Census: Aging population a potential health-care time bomb

A man looks over a brochures offering various retirement savings options Friday, February 3, 2012 in Montreal. The next set of data from the 2011 census will show how fast baby boomers are entering their golden years, and how quickly the population of seniors is overtaking the number of youngsters.

OTTAWA — Sixty-five is the new 55, or so the mantra among aging boomers holds.

And as Canada prepares to wish a happy 65th birthday to its five-millionth senior, lifestyle diseases driven by excess weight and sloth could see people developing age-related ailments faster than generations before them.

Census data released Tuesday counted 4,945,060 people aged 65 and older in Canada in 2011, an increase of more than 14 per cent since the last count in 2006 — a rate of growth more than double the 5.9-per-cent increase for the Canadian population as a whole.

This demographic shift — especially strong in Atlantic Canada and Quebec — is being driven by longer life expectancy, and the fact women aren't having enough babies to replenish the population.

By 2031, 22.8 per cent of the population will be 65 and older. The proportion will jump to one quarter — 25.5 per cent — by 2061.

"The entire Western world is on its way to a demographic tsunami of seniors, and we have to figure out ways to keep these people out of the health system," says Dr. Max Cynader, director of the Brain Research Centre and Djavad Mowafaghian Centre for Brain Health at Vancouver Coastal Health and the University of B.C.

In addition, the older the population, the higher the prevalence of neurodegenerative disorders such as Alzheimer's, he says.

The risk factors for stroke — age is the leading one — are the same as for heart attack: "Being overweight, smoking, high cholesterol, high blood pressure, diabetes, eating too much red meat," Cynader says.

"If you've got two or three of them together — if you have high blood pressure, and are overweight, and smoking — you're basically a walking time bomb."

People over 65 aren't all equal; they're a highly diverse bunch, says Dr. Parminder Raina, lead principal investigator for the Canadian Longitudinal Study on Aging, a major national study that is looking at why some people stay healthy with age, and others don't.

"But we hear about the obesity epidemic, the poorer nutrition. Perhaps not in the short term, but in the long run — especially for the baby boom population — that's going to be an issue in relation to chronic diseases that are going to happen and that are going to be detected early," says Raina, a professor at McMaster University in Hamilton.

Whether that translates into more disability down the road is unknown. The looming question is: how will those lifestyle changes affect the quality of our extra years of life?

According to a recent House of Commons health committee report, the average life expectancy of Canadians has increased by more than 30 years since the early 1900s — to 78 for men, and 83 for women in 2011. But the number of years lived in good health peaked in 1996, and has been on a downward slide since.

The majority of seniors have at least one chronic condition; as many as one in four has two or more.

Diabetes, chronic pain, bone-related diseases and some cancers are on the rise. Currently, half a million seniors suffer from dementia, a number that is expected to rise to more than a million by 2038, the committee heard. Eighty per cent of lung cancers occur in people over 60, while rates of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease caused by asthma and smoking among 65- to 75-year-olds is triple that of younger Canadians.

Raina, of McMaster, suspects issues related to mental health and stress are going to be an even bigger issue as the population ages.

"As people get older, families move away, social isolation starts to happen — and social isolation is an important determinant of how people age."

Humans experience a "depressingly steady decline" in cognitive performance — everything from reaction time to working memory — beginning in our early 20s.

Yet, "things that you might call wisdom," he says — our vocabulary, the ability to see the big picture, synonyms and antonyms — improve slightly with age, even into our 70s and 80s.

"There are a lot of things that are going south in the brain as you're getting older — your vulnerability to small diseases is increasing, your circulation is tending to be not quite as robust as it used to be, you're losing some neurons, for one reason or another," Cynader, of the Brain Research Centre, says.

The single most important thing people can do to reduce the risk of age-related brain decline is exercise, he says. It used to be thought that humans were born with all the neurons they would ever have.

"It turns out all of us are making new neurons every day — we're probably making in the order of 10,000 new neurons every week, and we're making them in parts of the brain that are crucial for learning and memory," Cynader says.

"You can double or triple the number of new neurons that you produce next week by doing physical exercise."

Normally the hippocampus, which is important in learning and memory, shrinks with age, increasing dementia risk. A recent study involving 120 older adults without dementia found that moderate-intensity exercise — a 40-minute walk, three times a week — increases the size of the hippocampus and improves memory after one year.

Sleep is also vital for the aging brain, he says. "There is evidence that if you disrupt sleep . . . your memory capabilities degrade."

Most people should also be eating less. "There are documented studies that you basically age more slowly if you eat less," Cynader says.

In addition, having a stimulating lifestyle — "exposing yourself to new ideas, exposing yourself to social contacts, basically being emotionally, socially, cognitively connected — is good for you," he added.

It goes beyond promoting healthy aging, Cynader says.

"We should be trying to maximize the human capital that we've got — because a lot of these people have a lot to offer still."

skirkey@postmedia.com

Twitter.com/sharon_kirkey

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